BRIEF CANDLE IN THE DARK
My Life in Science
Richard Dawkins
Ecco/HarperCollins
455 pages; $27.99
In Richard Dawkins's first memoir, An Appetite for Wonder (2013), he described losing his virginity, at the somewhat advanced age of 22, to a cellist in London.
His writing about this episode was typical of him. First he called upon science. "It isn't difficult for a biologist to explain why nervous systems evolved in such a way as to make sexual congress one of the consistently greatest experiences life has to offer," he said. "But explaining it doesn't make it any less wonderful."
Then he summoned literature and morality, and wrote: "I'll say no more on the subject, and will betray no confidences. It isn't that kind of autobiography."
Mr Dawkins's sequel to his memoir has arrived, and it isn't that kind of autobiography either. Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science presents a public life more than a private one.
This is autobiography as intellectual victory lap. What it lacks in intimacy it mostly makes up for with wit and bounce and a sense that this deeply learned man is running for mayor of our brains.
An Appetite for Wonder explored Mr Dawkins's illustrious family (many notable naturalists and soldiers); evoked his childhood in colonial Africa, where his father worked as a biologist; and underscored the wounds later inflicted at boarding school back in England (cold baths, beatings, dismal food).
He graduated from Oxford and spent time in Berkeley, California, during the late 1960s, dodging tear gas canisters and listening to Joan Baez. He married his first wife and published an important book about evolution The Selfish Gene (1976) that put him on the map as biologist and writer. He returned to Oxford and became a popular lecturer.
Mr Dawkins's argument in The Selfish Gene was that Darwin is widely misunderstood. Natural selection doesn't take place at the species or individual level, he wrote, but at the genetic level. The book displayed his gift for language. He coined the word "meme" to mean a cultural element, perhaps an idea, that can be passed along like a gene.
Brief Candle in the Dark picks up from that book's success. Mr Dawkins is invited to many places and he takes his readers along, shedding opinions, anecdotes and data as goes.
He can seem not quite of this era. When the Oxford student newspaper once asked him in a survey, "What is the price of a Big Mac?", he responded: "Oh, about £2,000 with a colour screen."
Mr Dawkins has a tendency to put a little pat of butter next to everyone's name. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is "this warm, friendly, witty, clever man," for example. The Queen guitarist Brian May is "supernormally nice." And so on, for hundreds of pages.
This has the odd effect of making his lesser effusions - the philosopher Roger Scruton is reported to be "quietly charming" - seem close to put-downs. Mr Dawkins mostly plays nice. Even his actual barbs tend to come wrapped in puff pastry.
Thus he describes the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, "whose genius for getting things wrong matched the eloquence with which he did so."
Two threads stand out from the many. The first is his longing to bridge the divide between science and literary culture. The second is the author's emergence, with his best-selling book The God Delusion (2006), as the most famous atheist on Earth.
On the topic of religion, Mr Dawkins remains cheerful but withering. He describes a speaking engagement at which a student from Liberty University, the college founded by Jerry Falwell, stood up and claimed that Liberty possessed a 3,000-year-old dinosaur fossil.
Here is Mr Dawkins's answer, printed in full:
"If it's really true that the museum of Liberty University has a dinosaur fossil which is labelled as being 3,000 years old, then that is an educational disgrace. It is debauching the whole idea of a university, and I would strongly encourage any members of Liberty University who may be here to leave and go to a proper university."
His debates with creationists and theologians are mostly civil. Yet he does describe how the "snarl-smiling" evangelical pastor Ted Haggard nearly ran him over in a parking lot after a contentious interview conducted for a British documentary.
"He berated us for abusing his hospitality, calling particular attention to his generosity in giving us tea with milk," Mr Dawkins writes. "He stressed the milk twice."
Mr Dawkins does not write about his popular and controversial Twitter account, where his opinions (on topics like Islam, race and gender) can sometimes seem to be reactionary.
In Brief Candle in the Dark, his genial, vaguely remote bearing is a form of the proverbial stiff upper lip. This is a baggy and drifting yet mostly tart book of conspicuous intellectual consumption.
A line that Mr Dawkins uses to praise another scientist, the evolutionary biologist Alan Grafen, could surely be applied to the author himself: "As PG Wodehouse might have put it, 'North of the collar stud, Alan stands alone.'"
© New York Times News Service
